25 Useful Adobe Air Applications for Designers

The Adobe AIR 2 runtime enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash software, and ActionScript to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser. Adobe AIR and the Adobe Flash Platform unleash the creativity of designers and developers by providing a consistent and flexible development environment for the delivery of applications across devices and platforms. Support for additional platforms, including Android, is under development.

For example Export lines you draw as vectorfiles for use in other graphicsapplications. Easily modify or create your styles while learning each setting using the convenient style preview.

Developers can also use Actionscript to dynamically control or augment brush movements.

Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded applications, without requiring changes to existing technology or processes. From conducting business transactions to managing music, Adobe AIR delivers applications that are easier, more powerful, and more fun to use. Download Adobe Air

Now lets have a look on the 25 Useful Adobe Air Applications for Designers.

Pixus – The Pixel Ruler and More

Color Browser

Color Browser is intended as a way to organize favorite color palettes locally. Since it would be a pain to reproduce palettes you’ve created yourself in Adobe apps, or online with Kuler, or ColourLovers you can import ASE files into the application (note that this was broken in previous versions). There is no limit to the number of colors in a palette, though there are obviously practical limits to what it can show.

COLOURlovers Desktop Color Finder

You can use the Desktop Color Finder to search our entire database of nearly 1 million named colors and more than 300,00 user created color palettes.

Contrast-A

Contrast-A allows users to interact with a 3-dimensional RGB color space, experiment with color combinations, check the contrast according to both WCAG 2.0 and 1.0 and see the results for different types of color deficiency. Custom color palettes can be created, printed and saved as Pdf to the user’s desktop.

Shrink O’Matic

Shrink O’Matic is an Adobe® AIR™ application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs.
Simply drag and drop images and they’ll be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats.

Livebrush

Livebrush is a unique motion-based drawing tool. Use the speed of your brush to toss graphics around the screen or elegantly swing the brush around your cursor. Over 100 styles and decorations. Export lines you draw as vector files for use in other graphics applications. Easily modify or create your styles while learning each setting using the convenient style preview.

Developers can also use Actionscript to dynamically control or augment brush movements.

Designview

Provides basic functionality of the Flex Builder Design View.

QR Code generator for mobile tagging

With the QR Code generator application for Adobe® AIR™ you can create your own QR Codes for mobile tagging. The QR Code itself contains several types of information such as a weblink, a complete short message with target number, a phone number or simple text. With a camera phone one can read the information in the code and immediately start the corresponding action – like accessing a mobile website or sending a short message to the target number. That is where the code got its name from: “QR” for Quick Response. To be able to read these 2D barcodes you need a small software on your mobile phone.

WebKut

WebKut is an Adobe AIR AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection. You can choose upload the screenshots to your flickr account.

Random Patter

Easy app that renders paterns based on given parameters. Rendered image can be used as a base of a mosaic. Preset parameters can be saved and loaded (in xml file format) and output image can be saved as SVG document.

Flickr Desktop Search

Desktop search for flickr.com

Splashup Light – Photo Editor

Splashup Light is an image editor tailored for those that want to enhance, beautify, or merely play with their photos. Effects include Levels, Contrast/Brightness, Hue Saturation, Text Editing and Shapes and much more. Splashup Light is ideal for those using Tablet PCs and other Portable Computers, but many find it just as suitable for everyday use on their desktops.

Boks

Boks is an AIR application (so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux) that provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework. It’s been designed for those who think the Grid System is good but never really took the time to give it love. It handles grid configuration, baseline rhythm pimpin’, CSS (with or without compression) and grid.png export, HTML layout and much more goodie-goodie!

Fireworks AutoBackup utility

Using this Auto Backup utility, a copy of the working file is automatically saved at a user-specified interval inside a folder named FWAIRBackup which is located in the same path as that of the original file.

De MonsterDebugger

De MonsterDebugger is an open source (released under the GPL license) debugger for Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR. Made using Flex and AIR and maintained by Dutch design studio De Monsters. With De MonsterDebugger you can explore your live application, adjust properties and run methods all at runtime. You can trace objects of any type to De MonsterDebugger and it will show the complete structure of that object in an easy-to-read tree structure.

PreFab3D

PreFab3D is an attempt to simplify common tasks, improve the workflow and greatly enhance the visual quality of your Flash 3D productions. It’s a small but powerfull tool that can add visual quality to low polygon models using a nice bag of tricks thanks to the advanced rendering capabilities of Away3D. In fact – we’d say that it’s the “missing link” between designers, modelers and Flash 3D developers!

Fnk

Fnk is an online visual programming environment that uses a dataflow approach for the analysis, processing and synthesis of image, sound and other data in real-time. It aims to be an easy and fun way to create multimedia and music presentation prototypes that interact with a number of input and output devices.

Sickworks’ Simple Flash Filter Generator

Sickworks’ Simple Flash Filter Generator is a tool to generate flashfilters and code in realtime. Just like using a graphic-programm like Photoshop.

Illustrate

Ever taken a screenshot of your desktop just to illustrate something on it, explaining where that little button is on that website? This application lets you draw directly on your desktop or whatever application that is running behind, and voila, that illustration you wanted is right there! Just take a screenshot of your completed illustration and share it with your freinds.

codeDraw

codeDraw is a vector edition tool that allows Adobe Flash & Adobe Flex developers, designers and so, to create ActionScript 2.0, 3.0 components, MovieClips using code, but without seeing the code. Just thinking on “where this line goes” or “I think this space craft should be rounded here” exactly as Adobe Flash does.

JellyCam – Stop Motion Maker

Simple stop motion animation maker. Use a webcam or series of photos to create a stop motion animation. Save your movie as an “.flv” file ready to upload to YouTube.